Journal // 26.07.26 // 17:30PM
Notebook Residue // Notation.
What kinds of knowledge can only survive by living? // Playback Reference // Neither One Of Us (Wants To Be The First To Say Goodbye), Gladys Knight & the Pips, 1973.
I’ve been spending some time with choreographer New Kyd’s portfolio over the past few days, and somewhere along the way, I realised I had been asking the wrong question.
I think we often inherit the idea that knowledge belongs to books, archives, museums etc. We write things down because we’re afraid they might disappear and rightly so. An archive can preserve evidence. It can tell us what happened, who was there, when it took place. It can stop history from slipping entirely through our fingers.
But somewhere in the middle of reading this portfolio, I found myself wondering if there are forms of knowing that disappear the moment nobody is left to live them.
Not remembering them but living them.
That’s the distinction that has been quietly following me around ever since.
At first, I found myself thinking about the body as another kind of archive. It seemed like an obvious conclusion. If photographs, letters, and manuscripts can preserve history, perhaps bodies will preserve history too. But the longer I stayed with the work, the less satisfied I became with that idea.
An archive stores evidence while a body does something far stranger than that. It carries rhythms, gestures, rituals, and ways of relating that cannot always be reduced to language. It doesn’t simply hold knowledge, but rather it allows something to keep moving.
That felt like the quiet centre of New Kyd’s practice.
The portfolio is filled with archives, mythology, Yoruba movement traditions, postmodern dance, labour, farming communities, performance scores, and vigorous historical research. That feels almost overwhelming at first glance as though every room opens into another. But after sitting with it for a while, I stopped seeing separate subjects and started seeing one enduring question appearing from different forms.
What kinds of knowledge can only survive by living?
That question changed how I read everything else.
New Kyd describes working through archival inquiry, embodied research, choreography, and performance. Initially, I read these as methods for making dance. Reading more carefully, however, I began wondering if they were doing something else.
They were creating conditions for transmission.
That word feels important
Transmission.
The archive isn’t abandoned, as much as it simply isn’t asked to do everything on its own. Historical research matters. Documents matter. Conversations matter. But alongside them sits the living body, not as an illustration of history, but as one of the ways histories continue to move.
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Performance begins to look different from here. Not as a final product, or even self-expression, but as another act of transmission.
The performance isn’t simply presenting research. It allows research to become lived experience. It asks what happens when history is moved instead of merely described. What happens when gestures become a way of thinking? What happens when choreography becomes a conversation between archives, and living bodies rather than an illustration of one?
The body, then, is less an archive than a medium.
I found myself returning to that distinction more than any other. We often speak about preserving culture, memories, and traditions. Reading this portfolio, preservation began to feel like an incomplete ambition. Some things aren’t simply preserved. They are continued. They remain alive because somebody keeps practising them, embodying them and, knowingly or not, passing them on.
An archive preserves evidence. A living body continues to practice evidence.
Perhaps that is why some traditions survive for centuries while others quietly disappear. Not because one was better documented than the other, but because someone, somewhere, continued to embody it. Continued to dance it. Continued to cook it. Continued to sing it. Continued to pray it. Continued to greet another person in the same familiar way. Continued to tell the story one more time.
Maybe continuity has always depended upon ordinary acts of living more than extraordinary acts of preservation.
By the time I reached the end of the portfolio, I realised I wasn’t really thinking about choreography anymore.
I was thinking about everything else.
About the things we inherit without being explicitly taught. About the ways of knowing that live inside repetition. About the quiet practices that shape cultures long before they are named by historians. About the possibility that some of the most important things human beings know have never belonged entirely to language in the first place.
I still think archives matter. They preserve what they might otherwise lose. But perhaps they have always needed companions.
Living bodies.
Because an archive can tell us that something once existed.
Perhaps the better question was never how we preserve knowledge. But what kinds of knowledge can only survive because someone, somewhere, continues living them?
Filed. Until the next journal notation.
PHOTO CREDIT LIST:
Row 1:
Still from Joy(ce) — Tanzhaus Zurich 2025. Photo credit: Moritz Hofstetter
Still from I’ll meet you at the end, Tanzhaus Zurich 2026. Photo credit: Liah Sinq
Still from I’ll meet you at the end, Tanzhaus Zurich 2026. Photo credit: Liah SinqRow 2:
Still from Chanson Noire: The tale of Pomegranates, Cabaret Voltaire Zurich 2026
Still from Joy(ce) unplugged, Chisenhale Studios London 2026
Still from RESTLESS: land of nois.e unplugged, Movement research at Judson Church, NYC 2024Row 3:
Still from Joy(ce) — Tanquartier Stuios Vienna 2026 Photo credit: Moritz Hofstetter
